Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Gardens of Babylon or Semiramis were ranked by the ancients among the wonders of the world, that is, of its beautiful works of art. They were suspended in the air by a prodigious number of stone columns on which an immense assemblage of palm beams rested. The entire structure supported a great weight of good, banked up soil, in which a variety of trees, fruits, and vegetables were planted and cultivated with great care. Water was brought down by means of pumps or canals. With the same outlay, gardens of infinitely superior taste, beauty, and size could have been landscaped in choice sites, but they would not have filled us with wonder or captured our imaginations to such an incalculable degree. [1]

Notes

1. This is not least because the site of the gardens has never been located, so they retain the mystique of a legendary secret garden. They are not mentioned in cuneiform sources and excavations have proved inconclusive. There are two conflicting classical descriptions: the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing in the first century AD, attributes them to Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC ), while Diodorus attributes them to a later, unnamed Achaemenid king. In the former account the gardens imitated the mountainous landscape of Media, while in the latter they were terraced. Both descriptions refer to the presence of trees, and agree that the gardens were supported by stone vaults and watered directly by the Euphrates (article ‘Babylon’, Stephanie Dalley, in Jellicoe et al., 1991, p. 32; Howatson and Chilvers, 1996, p. 296).